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Guided Meditation: Lovingkindness Practice

So, good morning, good afternoon. Welcome to all of you.

I see there's a watermark on the video where I'm running the YouTube and using my Zoom account. David Geffen gave, I think, a quarter billion dollars to UCLA, and so you get your name on IMC's Zoom feed for that kind of sum. [Laughter]

Anyway, I'm happy to be with you, to be sitting together. Maybe I'll just say a word before we sit. We'll settle in and do some metta^[1] practice, lovingkindness practice.

A mentor of mine said, "Matthew, there's a difference between kindness and niceness, and you're being nice." So metta is not niceness; it's a deeper kindness, and it's not pretending. We have to be very careful about pretending to feel one thing when we're feeling another in our practice, because when we pretend, it erodes some confidence in our path, in ourselves. Our heart is very sensitive to the misalignment of pretending.

And so we're never asked to pretend. This is about an authentic encounter with our own heart, and there's some way to connect with what's actually here in an authentic way. One of the brahmavihāras^[2] is here for you. One of them is always here for you, and so there's never a need to pretend—to turn kindness into niceness or something like this.

So let's sit together.

Bring a spirit of kindness towards your own body. The astounding number of things it's doing right in this moment, even if our attention goes to what feels like it's doing wrong.

One of my teachers said your body is dāna^[3], generosity, some kind of gift. Your body is dāna. Maybe this begins to open your heart as we settle and breathe.

Love in the face of goodness. So we can attune to our own goodness. It's not grandiose. The goodness we might detect is nothing we would want to brag about; it's a goodness that softens our heart. Maybe it's a goodness that you overlook always in yourself.

I promise this is not a self-indulgent kind of affirmation. The more deeply we sense in, appreciate, and abide in our own goodness, the more obvious that becomes in the eyes of others.

So we consider our goodness. Maybe rest in the heart center of your chest and feel the pulsating feeling of life. Maybe a little bit of warmth, a little softening, a little bit of love. Just stay with the signs of love, care, and softening.

When we silently whisper to ourselves, "May I be happy," it's really not a prayer about some future that may come. It is a way of touching into the heart right now, of ringing a bell and then listening to the reverberations in your body, softening your body, making your body more porous.

We are moved by our own goodness. Moved by the innocence of our own longing to be happy.

Maybe it's useful to use words or images: May I be happy. May I be safe, protected. May I live with ease.

We start to drop some of the vigilance. The vigilance of patrolling ourself, the vigilance of arrogance, the vigilance of self-hatred. We drop all of that.

Maybe right now it's safe enough to be moved by your own goodness. To abide in this kind of quiet love. You don't offer yourself this metta because of something; you just offer that.

Reflections on Lovingkindness

So, it's nice to practice with you. I know I said never pretend in your practice, but then I thought of Carol Wilson^[4] saying, "Fake metta is better than real aversion any day." [Laughter] That stuck with me. That's true.

But kidding aside, I do feel like we want to be careful about pretending. Sometimes the brahmavihāra realm feels like a zone where we're being enlisted to pretend something, and the heart rebels against that sense of inauthenticity. The encouragement is to find our own ways. How can we have this really intimate encounter with the moment, and find ways of practicing that feel real, alive, and true?

The Buddha suggested that fear and wanting are two sides of the same coin, the coin of clinging. Sometimes I don't like to trot out neuroscience so often, but sometimes I read something that reminds me a lot of dharma. The point is not to get the science exactly, but to hear the resonance with what this tradition offers.

Shelley Warlow and her colleague Kent Berridge^[5] note:

"Motivational salience can occur with either positive valence as incentive or negative valence as fear, and it's possible to flip the valence between the two forms under some conditions. Despite being affectively opposite, the two may still share some neural and psychological features. Normally both may engage mesolimbic systems, including dopamine signals in the nucleus accumbens, consistent with an amygdala role in bivalent positive and negative motivational salience. Some neurons can respond to both aversive outcomes or rewarding outcomes, or to their predictive cues, rather than strictly encoding only reward or fear per se. Some neurons might integrate sensory information, context, and motivational state to assign motivational salience with positive or negative valence to particular targets, making them either wanted or feared."

Wanting and fear. They seem about as far apart as possible, but maybe they're closer siblings than they might appear.

Neuroscientist Kay Tye^[6] says fear has an authoritarian command over the rest of the brain. And Thich Nhat Hanh^[7] said, "Fearlessness is the ultimate joy."

And so metta practice, this heart practice, is really about stepping out of wanting and stepping out of fear. Sometimes we step out of that, and there's just love. But sometimes metta practice, of course, is stepping out of wanting and fear by getting really close to it.

Anxiety depends on avoidance to some measure. The medicine around anxiety is actually to approach the feared experience. We drain the affective emotional charge from our anxiety and avoidance by doing the opposite, by moving towards it. And mindfulness is one way of moving towards. It's an approach orientation. All of mindfulness is an approach orientation; we permit our pain into awareness.

But in a sense, love is like the fullest approach we can make with our pain. With our love, we get so close to what is unresolved in our heart that we begin to habituate to it, and that pain loses some of its electrical charge. The metta actually starts to be a way of digesting fear. This was one of the classical ways that metta is prescribed: for fear.

We're stepping out of fear and out of wanting or controlling, because we know there is attached love—a love that includes some measure of possessiveness—and there's a love that is pure giving, no controlling. Attached love sounds bad in Buddhist spheres, but it's okay. We're going to have to pick our spots, I feel. As humans, maybe especially as lay people, people with partners, children, parents, and commitments, some measure of attachment is inevitable.

I saw a friend I've known for many years now, and I've known his daughter, who's now thirteen, since her birth. I asked him how he was, and he quoted the writer Susan Orlean^[8]. He said, "A parent is only as happy as their least happy child." I don't even have kids, but I know enough to just be touched by that sentiment. You know, only as happy as the least happy child. Some measure of... I don't know what we want to call that, the complexities of these karmically rich bonds with people that I don't think can be purified of all clinging. Can we consent to that? Can we bear that with grace?

And we cultivate the love that is without conditions, that is a warmth without control or possession. The warmth and kindness of metta, which is a kind of simple friendliness and kindness while wishing well. The proximate cause being seeing goodness. Love in the face of goodness. There's this image of a mother cow gazing at her calf, and sometimes we're the mother cow, sometimes we're the calf. But we sense goodness. There is well-wishing.

And just for me, amidst this cycle of grieving, I've become so sensitive to goodness. Just little bits of it that I see in others. If I'm going to cry, that's what's going to make me do it. Goodness is going to make me cry.

There's a phenomenon in psychology known as moral elevation, where witnessing acts of moral beauty inspires and elevates us, and we become more devoted to goodness. The wholesome, prosocial movement of our own heart is drawn out by witnessing it. This practice makes us very sensitive to goodness.

Lovingkindness is being moved by your own goodness. It's being moved by it. It's not the goodness we put on our resume or something. And as I said in the sit, it's not even like, "Well, I'll offer this love because of..." You get into the "because of" and then there's always the contradictory whatever, and you get into debates about worthiness and deserving. And it's like, no, no, no, not because of. I'm just offering care. Being moved by your own goodness.

To abide in this is very healing. And not self-indulgent. It will connect us more deeply with all beings, a sense of warmth radiating from our heart. Sometimes we get quiet, and there's nothing but warmth. There's nothing on the other side of our love. Emerging from that really dramatizes the pain of hatred, of divisiveness, of separation, of aversion. Hatred becomes less and less tenable, less and less bearable^[9].

And so sometimes metta is abiding in love, and sometimes it is lowering our resistance, bringing love to what needs love. Because the truth of dukkha^[10], that needs to be mourned for a long time, and that takes love. It really is often almost unbelievable that being human is like this. It's going to take some love to open to. And the metta practice helps. Sometimes we just cannot feel something until the love thaws out something in our heart. And so in these ways, metta is both a purification practice and a practice of cultivation. The many, many blessings of metta.

So we'll stop, and I wish you all much goodness today. Let us be attuned to the signs of goodness in ourselves and others, and open our heart to that today. Okay, thank you.